Donald Trump desires Voice of America to close up—and he doesn’t care concerning the injury it should trigger.
The company frames the 1,400 job cuts since March as a “reduction in force” that has shrunk the workers at VOA and USAGM by a mind-boggling 85%. The displaced workers have been placed on paid depart and are slated to be formally dismissed in September.
A few of these affected had simply returned from administrative depart, together with reporters from VOA’s Persian-language service, who had been briefly reinstated following Israel’s assault on Iran, in line with Politico.
However Friday’s mass firings had been hardly shocking.
The identical month, the administration additionally terminated almost 600 VOA contractors, in direct defiance of a court docket order issued in March that paused the dismantling.
Lake, a former TV anchor and twice-failed GOP candidate in Arizona, made her intentions official this month when she knowledgeable Congress of her plan to remove almost each place beneath her watch. Lake claimed she solely wanted to keep up 20 VOA staffers to adjust to authorized obligations.
In an announcement Friday, Lake stated 250 workers will stay throughout USAGM, VOA, and the Workplace of Cuba Broadcasting.
She framed the catastrophic layoffs as “decisive action” to rein in “out-of-control federal bureaucracy” and “put American taxpayers first.” Critics argue the actual objective, nevertheless, is to silence one of many authorities’s few international counterweights to authoritarian disinformation.
Kari Lake being interviewed after a Nov. 2023 Trump marketing campaign rally in Hialeah, Fla.
“This spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds U.S. ideals of democracy and freedom around the world,” stated Patsy Widakuswara, VOA’s former White Home bureau chief and lead plaintiff in a lawsuit in opposition to Lake and USAGM, to The New York Instances.
Staff stated the layoffs had been as merciless as they had been sweeping. One journalist reported that some workers found they’d misplaced their jobs after stepping exterior for a morning break, solely to seek out their badges had been deactivated and so they had been locked out of the constructing after they returned.
To make issues worse, some workers too younger for necessary retirement are reportedly being terminated with out severance in an obvious violation of company coverage.
In a joint assertion, the plaintiffs within the lawsuit urged Congress to take motion.
“Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and extremist groups are flooding the global information space with anti-American propaganda,” they wrote. “Do not cede this ground by silencing America’s voice.”
Due to Trump, Voice of America—based throughout World Struggle II to counter Nazi disinformation—is now positioned to fall silent. Its mission and far of its workers worn out by a callous and clueless American president.
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